“No!” Lance shouted as everything in him was abruptly wrenched into a knot of outraged protest. His body was being brutalized, every shred of decency in him violated. He writhed and bucked as he struggled to free himself but the grip on his hips was implacable and the invasion slowly deepened, growing enormous, too great for him to contain. It was tearing him apart. Pain sharpened outrage. He was being fucked.

  The word splintered his mind. A man was in him, finding loathsome satisfaction in him, indifferent to his consent. His instinct to protect himself wavered as a deeper urge came boiling to the surface, an urge to participate in his own debasement. He was being dragged down into the filth of life, being compelled to face for the first time his common humanity. He claimed no special rights or dispensations. Resistance was shattered. He was overwhelmed by his will to surrender. Tension drained from his body. The pain was gone. Hard flesh moved smoothly in him, asserting its mastery of him.

  He began to move to Jim’s rhythm. His erection had wilted under the initial assault but he became incredulously aware that it was reviving. He was being taken, possessed, enslaved. The fastidious Lance Vanderholden was nothing but a body being used for a man’s pleasure. He exulted in his degradation. He wanted to be fucked.

  Their bodies were in tune for the approaching climax. They grunted and cried out and Lance shouted with triumph as they had simultaneous orgasms. He welcomed the full weight of the powerful body that collapsed on his back in tribute to his ability to serve another’s desire. His chest was heaving but he was scarcely aware of having had a sexual experience. He retained no sense of pleasure or lust satisfied. It had been a psychological shock, a radical realignment of his whole personality. He felt as if he had taken a first faltering step in learning who he was. He was lying under a man who was still in him, defiling him, retaining his claim to him. Lance belonged to him more than he belonged to anybody else in the world.

  He uttered an audible gasp as Jim withdrew from him. He lifted himself off the table and Lance watched the strong back disappear into another room. He still hadn’t seen the instrument that had forced his surrender. He lay numb and motionless, soiled by his own sperm, amazed and appalled. There was an emptiness in him that he had never felt before, an emptiness that could be filled only by a powerful man seizing him, brutalizing him, bending him to his will. He couldn’t think clearly about what it meant. He was seething with outrage and revulsion and an exultant sense of having triumphed over his carefully cultivated sensibilities.

  Jim returned and stopped near him. “You can go clean up if you want,” he said in a quiet, pleasant voice, the accent softer than a New Yorker’s.

  Lance was aware that Jim was wearing his shorts again but he couldn’t look at him. How could he face a guy who had fucked him? Jim turned away and Lance quickly pulled himself up from his mess and hurried to a small bathroom. He took a healing shower, assessing the damages. He was sore but seemed unharmed. Trailing a towel at his side, he returned to the massage room. Jim was standing at a trolley-table arranging tubes and bottles on it. Lance forced himself to look at him as he approached. He saw no conqueror’s gleam of triumph in his eyes, only stolid amiability. Jim’s apparent indifference was more humiliating than letting himself be had. He wanted him to pull off his shorts and take him again. Still unsure that his cock was big enough to offer for inspection, he lifted the towel over it while it burgeoned startlingly.

  “I’ve never been fucked before,” he said.

  “That so? Don’t let it throw you. Lots of guys don’t know they want it until it happens. You sure as hell wanted it. God, what a body. Having my cock up Lance Vanderholden’s ass made me feel like God Almighty.”

  The crude words thrilled him; they stripped him of all pretensions. “You know me?” he asked.

  “Doesn’t everybody? Mac told me you were one of his regulars.”

  “How did you know I’d let you?”

  A small grin appeared on Jim’s friendly face. “It was obvious. You were hot for it. I don’t go in for rape. If you want to make a definite date for next time, I’ll be sure to be free for you. We can have some extra time.”

  “Tomorrow,” Lance said, amazed by his unhesitating shamelessness. “Four o’clock.”

  “Okay. Try not to be late.”

  It sounded like a parental admonition. Lance had always wondered what it would be like to have a father. Jim’s authority over him was absolute by right of possession. He couldn’t imagine refusing another session. He dropped the towel to his side, revealing what had happened while he stood in front of him, waiting to be sure that he was still going to be dismissed.

  “Okay. I’ve seen your cock,” Jim said, smiling comfortably. “It’s a beauty. Beat it before I start thinking I’m Superman.”

  “Is yours much bigger?”

  “Bigger than that thing? No such luck. You’ll see tomorrow.”

  “It felt huge.”

  “Look, cocks are like clothes marked Small, Medium and Large. Guys who take Large aren’t all the same size. I might be a Large but you’re bigger. Why should I have to tell you? Don’t you suck?”

  “No.”

  “Famous last words. See you tomorrow.”

  Lance thought of him during the rest of the day and first thing when he woke up with a girl at noon the next morning. He was coming to terms with the experience. The moment when he had resisted, the moment when Jim had taken him by force, was seared on his memory. He had felt a sense of atonement not unlike, he thought unexpectedly, what he imagined he was supposed to feel when his mother sent him to confession. As he entered adult life, he had begun to be aware of sins of which no priest could absolve him—the sin of being spoiled and pampered and protected, of being suffocated by privilege. Jim’s merciless cock had been an instrument of absolution. He was learning to atone for his heritage. His humiliation had given him a glimpse of genuine humility.

  Somehow, he didn’t think it had anything to do with discovering that he was queer. Atonement wasn’t supposed to be a pleasure. Nobody had ever made demands on him the way Jim had. Regardless of shame or suffering, he was eager to offer himself for his satisfaction.

  When he went to his appointment that afternoon, he had a hard-on almost before he had closed the door of the massage room. He discarded his towel. Jim looked up with his small grin from the trolley-table.

  “Well, hi there,” he greeted him. “Thanks. That’s very flattering.” He peeled off his shorts and sauntered over to him. Lance’s eyes were fixed on an erection for the first time in his life. It looked muscular somehow, like the rest of Jim’s body, knotted and aggressive and bigger than he expected a cock to be. Something in him instinctively recoiled from it. He glanced down at them both and saw that his own was undeniably bigger. He felt a small lift of pride as Jim put his hands on him appraisingly, looking down at it.

  “I’ve seen bigger. You should be thankful it stopped there. I know a kid with a twelve-incher. He has a terrible time, poor guy. Nobody can figure out what to do with it.”

  Jim put his arms around him and pulled him in against his powerful body. His tongue was aggressive when it entered Lance’s mouth. Lance hadn’t known that guys kissed each other. It seemed a bizarre dislocation of the natural order and he responded avidly. Their whiskers scraped against each other.

  Jim released him and pulled a wrestling mat out from a wall and threw towels and a bottle onto it and pulled Lance down to it. He kneeled over him, his hands on his hips, his knotted erection thrust out with crude command. “Okay. Let’s see Lance Vanderholden suck cock.”

  Tears of shame stung the back of Lance’s eyes as he moved to obey. He could feel Jim observing him as he opened his mouth wide to receive him. His craving for self-abasement provided an illusion of eagerness to his performance. His own erection grew painfully rigid. The hard flesh in his mouth felt like some strange rubberized manufactured product, unlike anything his lips had ever touched. It stretched his jaws uncomfortably. It didn’t satisfy any of the senses. He couldn’t feel the pleasure he was presumably giving, as he could when his mouth was joined to a mouth. He supposed that the reward might come with orgasm but hoped that it wouldn’t reach that point. He was grateful when Jim pulled back.

  “That does it. I don’t want to come,” he said.

  “Don’t I do it right?”

  “Beautifully. You’re going to be an ace cocksucker but I’ve just got started on you. We’re in no rush.” His expert hands took charge. Struggling against shame, surrendering self-respect, Lance felt as if his body were being reinvented. It assumed positions at the slightest bidding of the hands, legs sprawled out wantonly or lifted in the air, kneeling with his body flung out backwards on the support of Jim’s arm so that his cock soared into his mouth. He masturbated when directed to do so and his ejaculation was flung out between them, soiling them both.

  “Fuck me,” Lance blurted, swept by a fierce exhilaration at acknowledging his abject lust for punishment. He cried out as a blinding flash of pain struck him. He choked on a sob. Tears welled up in his eyes. Jim knew that he didn’t want to be spared.

  The next few days dulled the edge of Lance’s ecstatic submission to the masseur’s will. He lost the exciting feeling of being brutalized. His body had adapted. He had learned how to serve Jim’s depraved demands. That thrill remained but what they actually did, their unorthodox acts, became a banal catalogue of sexual license. He had grown accustomed to the feel of a man’s body, but caressing a cock or a hairy chest appealed to him less than caressing a girl’s soft body. He felt in closer contact to ugly reality but he was sure there was a world of depravity that remained closed to him. He kept hoping that Jim would impose on him some ultimate degradation beyond which there could be no further atonement. The thought of it kept his cock hard for his partner.

  When he went for his usual appointment after a Sunday break in the country with Pam, he found old Mac, the regular, back at his accustomed post. Lance didn’t ask any questions. He assumed that Jim must have been a temporary replacement. They had never talked about anything except sex. Jim hadn’t felt it worth mentioning that they wouldn’t be seeing each other again. Maybe Mac had returned unexpectedly.

  He was left with the feeling of emptiness but supposed it was time to stop before he went too far. Whatever cravings remained in him were too daunting to be explored except under duress. Shackles still confined him. The looks he encountered from guys in the street no longer frightened him but he didn’t see anybody he felt like taking on. He doubted if many queers could match the masseur’s brutal authority. He couldn’t imagine choosing to go to bed with a guy simply for peaceful pleasure.

  He had been booked with Geraldine Fleet, his costar, to make a publicity appearance in Chicago on the following Sunday, flying out after the show on Saturday night, and he had checked to make sure that they would get back early enough on Monday to see Jim before the evening performance. He wouldn’t have to worry about that anymore.

  Waiting at the airport for the plane to load, he left his star sitting with their luggage and wandered off to a newsstand on an island in the middle of the lounge. As he browsed, his attention was caught by a pretty girl similarly occupied on the other side of the stand. He gazed at her across a stack of newsprint. She looked very young and her short brown hair was boyishly tousled. All he could see of what she was wearing was the top of an open-necked man’s shirt; a view of her breasts was cut off by magazines. She looked up and their eyes met. Despite her youth, hers immediately filled with such explicit, knowing sexuality that he began to get an erection. He had never known a girl to make it so clear so quickly that, she wanted him.

  She lowered her eyes while his mind searched frantically for something he could do with her. There was only half an hour before his scheduled departure. An airport offered no shelter for eager lovers. He hadn’t ever picked up a girl and this seemed hardly the time to try.

  She looked up again and their eyes locked into each other. The desire in hers was almost palpable, like hands caressing him. She seemed to take it for granted that they were going to make love. Her lips parted and he saw the tip of her tongue between them. His heart accelerated. He was struck by something undefinably odd and ambiguous about her, suggesting that sex with her would be different from anything he had ever experienced. She inclined her head as if to beckon him and turned and strolled away.

  He was immediately in motion. As he rounded the newsstand, he got his first full-length look at her and, with a shock that almost brought him to a halt, he realized that she was unmistakably a boy, wearing sports shirt and slacks. The momentum of pursuit carried him on while his mind raced to adjust to facts. He was being led to a door marked men. He had heard of things happening in men’s rooms that sounded pretty disgusting but his tastes had lost a good deal of their refinement in the last few weeks. His erection was straining to be let out.

  The door the boy had been heading for closed behind him. Following him into the big antiseptic room, Lance couldn’t deny that he found it a bit alarming. Danger lured him on, not any danger in the pretty youth but the danger of discovery. A man was standing at the end of a long line of urinals. The boy had stationed himself at the opposite end but others might move in closer to him. Lance knew that his erection was too big to produce in front of a urinal without everybody seeing it. He would be committing a public indecency. Crossing the few yards that separated him from the act, he felt an army of Vanderholdens watching him, wailing and rending their garments and sprinkling ashes on their heads with shame at his descent into further depravity.

  When he reached his destination, the boy eased himself over toward him so that their shoulders touched. It took Lance an incredulous moment to accept the fact that his companion was unabashedly, if discreetly, masturbating; the motion of his hand was imperceptible except from Lance’s vantage point. The instrument he was manipulating was startingly substantial for such a feminine kid, bigger than Jim’s. Maybe Jim had filled him with misplaced pride about his own. It was too late now to avoid finding out.

  He struggled with a tangle of shirttails and shorts, and produced the evidence. He took a small backward step to avoid contact with porcelain and edged around toward the boy so that his back was partially turned to the other urinals. He felt reasonably safe from observation although his position might look odd for the ostensible purpose of his being here. The boy made a murmur of admiration. Lance saw that he had nothing to fear from comparison. An impulse to thrust it forward to touch the other was abruptly curbed by his catching movement out of the corner of his eye. The man at the other end was going through the motions of completing his business. Lance dropped his hands to shield his nakedness and prepared for an outraged denunciation.

  His heart was racing as the danger passed. He heard footsteps receding and the sound of the door opening and closing. A hand pushed his hand out of the way and moved on his erection, taking bold, expert possession of it. His orgasm was instantaneous and his knees buckled as his ejaculation splashed out into the urinal. A hand moved purposefully beside him and another ejaculation jetted into the air in front of them. It was followed by the sound of the door opening and closing again and approaching footsteps.

  With panicked haste, Lance wiped himself with his handkerchief and bundled himself back into his trousers. The boy’s composure seemed unshaken as he unhurriedly followed suit.

  “Going to Chicago?” the girlish stranger asked. The hum of ventilators and the rush of water made private conversation possible. The new arrival stationed himself halfway along the row of urinals.

  “Yeah,” Lance said.

  “I’ll see you on the plane. Be sure to get a seat by yourself. First class?”

  “I think I’m supposed to have some sort of compartment.”

  “Perfect. My God, Lance. Your cock. I’ll give you the best blow-job you’ve ever had.”

  With that blithe boast, the boy turned and moved toward the door with graceful assurance. He had said his name. People had recognized him long before he had set foot on a stage, so it gave him no satisfaction. It simply added to the danger. He was courting blackmail. He felt very daring, beyond any hope of rejoining the ranks of the privileged few. He was sinking deeper into the mass of corrupt humanity. Lance followed the boy slowly, letting the distance grow between them. By the time he was out, his astonishing partner had disappeared among the loitering passengers.

  When the flight was called, an escort presented himself to usher them on board, followed by a uniformed attendant carrying their belongings. His mother would have approved but Lance found it irksome. He felt as if he were being isolated from the contamination of his fellow passengers. He didn’t see his pretty playmate and wondered if the ostentatious VIP treatment would scare him off. He should have expected difficulties when he was in the mood to open more doors.

  Makeshift compartments had been rigged up for them at opposite ends of the first-class cabin. They had each been allotted two seats with the arms removed and curtains hung around them, so they had adequate beds and a degree of privacy, but the accommodations weren’t suitable for the athletic display Gerry expected of sex so Lance was able to give her a quick good-night kiss without fear of reproach and went a few rows forward to his curtained space.

  An attractive stewardess was waiting to get him settled. His attempts at a flirtation were repulsed by smooth professional cordiality. He dropped into a seat across the aisle from his improvised compartment; there was no need to make himself difficult to find. The stewardess told him that there would be only five or six first-class passengers, so he could take all the room he wanted.

  Once airborne, he read Variety until box-office figures began to make him sleepy. The handful of first-class passengers snapped off lights and retired for the night. He rose and stretched, stepping across the aisle to his compartment. He experimented with the curtains for privacy. They closed around him adequately, although anybody brushing against them might open gaps through which he could be seen.